Month: April 2017

Some readers might be interested in this post/article just published in Nature – Human Behaviour. The title is “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies” (a slightly misleading title), and the main findings are:

Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.

Figure 1: Income inequality in Europe and the United States, 1900–2010.

 
Figure 2: The actual US wealth distribution plotted against the estimated and ideal distributions across all respondents:

Figure 3: Percentage of children earning more than their parents, by birth year.

The video of Professor Cass Sunstein’s recent talk “New Directions in Behaviourally Informed Policy” at UCD is available, along with links to papers and other reading, at this link. The event was hosted jointly by the UCD College of Social Science and UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy in conjunction with the Irish Behavioural Science and Policy Network. The talk is followed by a very wide-ranging Q+A and also includes a number of observations about this area of policy in Ireland.

The new edition of the ESR is online now with the following papers:

The changing nature of Irish wage inequality from boom to bust by Niamh Holton and Donal O’Neill

Understanding Irish labour force participation by Stephen Byrne and Martin O’Brien

Addressing market segmentation and incentives for risk selection: How well does risk equalisation in the Irish private health insurance market work? by Conor Keegan, Conor Teljeur, Brian Turner and Steve Thomas

Are perceptions of greatness accurate? A statistical analysis of Brian O’Driscoll’s contribution to the Irish rugby team by Peter D. Lunn and David Duffy